Re-certified HDDs?

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Romeomium

Limp Gawd
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Feb 9, 2017
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Are re-certified HDD's reliable/worth it? Amazon has re-certified 3TB HGST Enterprise Drives for stupid cheap.
 
its kind of a crap-shoot. if its for non-mission critical stuff like game installs, why not try it? my 500GB is a re-cert and its been fine for 6+ years. BUT Ive only kept games on it for the last 4yrs just in case. those HGST are pretty damn good drives to begin with but you never know why they were re-certs. so its your call...
 
One Amazon customer mentioned receiving a recertified HGST with zero hours in the SMART listing, but a check with GSmartControl showed that the SMART log had not been erased and still showed something like 25,000 hours.
 
I want to buy a bunch of HDDs for a SnapRaid+Drivepool setup, for use with my Plex Media Server. Not mission critical, but it would be a PITA if I lost a bunch of stuff. I plan on 4 data +1 parity drive. They're cheap enough that I could have 1 die each year, and still come out ahead as I anticipate prices will continue to decrease as SSDs get cheaper.

But 25,000+ hours in an enterprise environment is no small amount of usage. Is there any way to tell how much data was written/read if the SMART data was deleted? 25,000 hours with 20,000 at idle might not be terrible.
 
I dunno... a "re-certified" HDD to me at least is akin to buying a "re-certified" condom. Sure, it probably works, but then would I really want to buy something like this and use it? Ummm, no.
 
I have some data center refurb HDs in my nas, knock on wood, no problems yet.
 
When it comes to recerts, don't take smart data like hours of use as a guarantee because it is trivial to reset any of that data if you know what you are doing and have a simple serial to ttl cable. It could show 24 hours and actually have 24,000. Like anything else, it is a risk/reward situation.
 
I was looking at HDDs on Amazon and a lot of the vendors don't state new or refurb in their listing. Add that to the fact that Amazon has no qualms about selling open box stuff as new and I'm not sure if I'd really want to buy "new" HDDs there.

That said, I bought a couple of those $68 3TB UltraStar 7K4000 drives knowing full well that they were refurbs and have had one running in a non-critical add on to my router for several months no problem, and archived a bunch of stuff on another and took it out of service. But I want a quad of the 6TB He6K (I think that's what they're called) UltraStars, and I want the 5 yr mfg warranty - not the 1 year refurb warranty.
 
Romeomium said:
Are re-certified HDD's reliable/worth it? Amazon has re-certified 3TB HGST Enterprise Drives for stupid cheap.
Click to expand...

Can I suggest an Alternate source?
Newegg has a Refurb and Open Box section. About 3 years ago I got 4x 1 TB SATA II drives from them Barracuda ES models, I believe... but they have all brands and sizes too. I know folks bash Seagate HDD now. I've had good success. I also use other brands.
Anyhow, Newegg sourced Refurbs have been really good to me... along with other Refurb hardware from them too.

BlackDragon1971
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I always prefer Amazon, because their return policy is bar non the best on the internet that I've seen. That said, most of my recent PC build purchases have been through Newegg because of the price.

Ideally, I want 12-20TB of usable space out of 4 data disks. I just don't want to spend $1000 on them!
 
Supercharged_Z06 said:
I dunno... a "re-certified" HDD to me at least is akin to buying a "re-certified" condom. Sure, it probably works, but then would I really want to buy something like this and use it? Ummm, no.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't know, it's been over 10 years for me. Marriage has it's perks!
 
re-certified by whom?
is it the same if I pulled a used drive and ran a test or two on it then called it re-certified instead of used?

I'd expect they're likely just used pulls someone cleaned up and tested to see if they're working, not that they failed and are re-manufactured or refurbished from damaged ones.

I've got a used HGST that I've been running for 2.5 years now it's used daily and it's fine.
 
I think that's exactly it.

I'm going to give it a shot. I'll update this thread if there are any problems! Still 2+ weeks away from being able to use them though, with the damn Ryzen wait!
 
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